In Sierra Leone, Giving the Stigma of Ebola a Good, Swift Kick

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Refusing to live in Ebola’s shadow, Erison Turay and others in Sierra Leone found new strength and solidarity on the soccer field.Published OnJuly 23, 2015CreditImage by Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

KENEMA, Sierra Leone — Under the hot midday sun, Erison Turay was lecturing his teammates before their first game. “Do not look happy,” he told them, as they stood there in their matching black T-shirts with the words “I Survived Ebola” in large white and red letters. “We must be serious. We must play as a remembrance for those that aren’t here.”

As the team took the field, Mr. Turay’s face was stone serious. Walking onto the dusty pitch, surrounded by hundreds of fans and curious onlookers, he could not help but break form and smile. A few months ago, people would cross the street when they saw him coming, afraid to get too close to an Ebola survivor. The same for his teammates. Now they were being warmly welcomed onto the field for their first soccer game.

Mr. Turay is one of the 16,000 survivors from last year’s Ebola epidemic that swept across West Africa, wiping out entire families and tearing apart communities. Survivors were left mostly on their own, with little idea how to get by in a suddenly inhospitable world where even family members would not receive them. So, Mr. Turay thought, what is the one thing that everyone could come together around?

Thus began the Kenema Ebola Survivors Football Club — KES F.C. for short — an all-survivors soccer team led by Mr. Turay, made to bring survivors together and create a new community from the shared pain of the past.

It has been more than a year now since the Ebola outbreak peaked. Kenema, the third-largest city in Sierra Leone, has mostly returned to normal. The number of new cases has dwindled to almost nothing, and Sierra Leone has hopes of soon reaching 42 days without any new cases, allowing it to declare itself free of Ebola.

However, as the disease fades, problems for the survivors have grown. Across the country, they are being cast out and stigmatized for the disease that almost killed them. Over the past year, many survivors have reported being thrown out of their homes and kicked out of public places. For many in Sierra Leone, the survivors became an unwitting symbol of the destruction that tore the country apart.

Ebola survivors are rarely contagious within a few months after they recover. Aside from traces found in semen and noncontagious traces inside the eye, after patients are deemed Ebola-free they are no longer a risk to the people around them.

More than a year after the outbreak began, however, that lesson had yet to sink in, and the survivors found there was no escape from their pasts, even though Ebola leaves no outward scars. “When you walk into a store, they would say, ‘That one is a survivor. Don’t allow him to enter here,’ ” Mr. Turay said. “It makes me feel like I have another Ebola.”

By forming a team, he hoped to fight back. “We come together as a group to tell others that nothing is there that they can do, that we cannot also do.”

At 23 years old, Mr. Turay is well known around Kenema. While many in this small city got sick, few faced as much tragedy as did he and his close-knit family. In total, 38 family members died from Ebola. Mr. Turay and his mother, who also survived, are the only ones left.

Last August he was in college in the capital, Freetown, when a call came from his father.

“He said, ‘You must come home now. All of us, we are all sick,’” Mr. Turay said. “At that time, we did not know if Ebola is real or not. So I came.”

With ambulances tied up with dozens of cases across the city, he started transferring sick family members to the hospital on his motorbike. Not long after, he fell sick himself. Afraid to ride his bike, he walked 10 miles in the hot sun to admit himself to an Ebola treatment unit.

DURING the outbreak, despite Ebola’s fearsome reputation as a killer, nearly 60 percent of those infected recovered from the illness. After weeks of treatment, Mr. Turay was declared free of Ebola and was quickly released. When he returned home, he found that more than half of his family had already died, with many more deaths yet to come.

Mr. Turay has regained most of the weight he lost fighting Ebola. He spends his days making a bit of money as a motorcycle taxi driver and taking care of his mother at home. He used the small amount of donations that foreign aid organizations gave him to buy a PlayStation 2 and a soccer game. “It helps to avoid the sad thoughts,” he says.

His father, Abu Bakar Turay, was an elder and wise man around Kenema. Family members and friends would come to him for advice and guidance. Erison especially looked up to him. When his father died, Mr. Turay was not sure how he would possibly move on. But now he thinks he knows a way.

“If we are playing this football,” he said, “we can forget about the past.”

It was last December, as the Ebola outbreak began to ease, that Mr. Turay came up with the idea of practicing soccer with survivors. It would help them get out of their homes and find something to do with their free time (most were out of work after recovering form the sickness). By April, with the assistance of some foreign aid workers living in Kenema, KES F.C. had a website, a Facebook page, laminated IDs for all of the players and home and away T-shirts, all amazing feats in such a remote and underdeveloped part of the country.

In May, they played their first game, against the Ebola Fighters, a team made up of nurses, ambulance drivers and health workers who had cared for them earlier in the year. Mr. Turay was the team captain. Women brought hand-painted signs on old reused orange tarps. Police officers swung long sticks at young fans trying to sneak onto the playing field. A law in place restricting public gatherings was ignored by all.

The women played first. Wearing handmade jerseys and plastic soccer shoes, they lined up beside one another and touched hands before the game, an almost unthinkable act just a few months ago.

After 45 minutes of play, the Survivors defeated the Fighters, 2 to 0. They dumped bags of plastic water on one another’s heads to celebrate and cool off.

Next came the men’s teams. Most of the players were in their early to mid-20s. The play was a bit slow and uncoordinated, as the Fighters took an early lead in the first half. “Well, they didn’t have Ebola,” Mr. Turay said with a laugh.

Things did not get much better in the second half, as the Survivors lost, 5 to 0. But they walked off the field, smiling and waving to the crowd, which by now had swelled to around 500. Then, to their surprise, they were rushed by their opponents and the budding crowd. They cheered together and patted one another on the back, unafraid to touch and embrace. “They are our brothers!” one player shouted, wrapping his arm around Mr. Turay.

Correction:

A reporting credit was omitted for the Saturday Profile article, about Erison Turay, who leads a soccer team of Ebola survivors from Sierra Leone. Tommy Trenchard contributed from Kenema, Sierra Leone.

Tommy Trenchard contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: In Sierra Leone, Giving the Stigma of Ebola a Good, Swift Kick. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe